A complete light field, which is also called plenoptic function, has six dimensions. They are two spatial dimensions, two angular dimensions, one spectral dimension and one temporal dimension. A light field (LF) camera, also known as a plenoptic camera, captures light travelling in every direction through a scene. That is, contrasted with a conventional camera, which records only light intensity, an LF camera captures both the intensities and the directions of the light rays. This enables sophisticated data processing even after the image data is captured. One can for example virtually change focus or perspective, or estimate depth maps from a single exposure.
However, the traditional LF cameras, for example, Lytro, Raytrix, etc., using a micro-lens array, may only record four dimensions of the light field, i.e., two spatial and two angular dimensions. In this disclosure, we propose a new snapshot plenoptic imaging (SPI) system that is able to capture 5D multi-spectral light fields (MLFs)—two spatial, two angular and one spectral dimensions, in a single exposure. This SPI system utilizes spectral-coded catadioptric mirrors, and can generate 5D MLFs with a resolution of no more than 5 nm.